Late Birds And Belching Cows

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By Sharon Begley

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Some books try to make science palatable by coating it in mysticism, Tao-of physics style, while others embed it in cutthroat lab polities, as "The Double Helix" did. Judith Stone, a columnist for Discover magazine, has opted for spritzing the field with a generous dose of nitrous oxide. She writes, "There are two ways to approach a subject that frightens you and makes you feel stupid: you can embrace it with humility and an open mind, or you can ridicule it mercilessly." Anyone who doesn't know DNA from UFO can be grateful that Stone chose the latter.

The bad news is that "Light Elements" favors puns to a painful extent. An essay on a mummification factory describes the "stiff competition" and "esprit de corpse"; a discourse on portable toilets goes off on a "johndarmes" tangent. If you can keep from wincing, you'll get to essays that manage to convey the lunatic side of science while also slipping in some information. Stone's topics range from unusual causes of the greenhouse effect (belching cows) to why nails scraping a blackboard give people the willies (which provides an excuse for a discussion of complex acoustic wave forms). New diseases make her wonder who should host the telethon. And Stone realizes that science is never so useful as when analyzing popular myth: rolling stones indeed gather no moss, blood is 10 to 30 percent thicker than water but, to set the record straight, even late birds get the worm.

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